Thread: Nobel peace prize

Originally Posted by jaegerhund

Wasn't Hitler nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?

Anyone can be nominated, by almost anyone (well, not really, but it's inclusive enough to make who is nominated not say anything about the prize itself).

I think the Nobel Peace Prize generally is given out a bit too hastily and sometimes to people I personally don't associate with peace. In general the other prizes do have a bit more constraint.

Having said that, I don't find Gore & the IPCC a terrible choice, we still have to see the real impact, but I think you can safely say that they've raised awareness of this problem. Gore may not go about it in the best way, and he might want to leave the campaigning to someone else (or change his style), but it's been effective enough so far.

Originally Posted by gugi

Kees - the link is avoiding future wars. I think it's very reasonable and thoughtful, even though seems on the idealistic side.

Fact or wishful thinking? There used to be a time (The Cold War) when having nuclear bombs as a mutual deterrent was thought to prevent wars! Eventually it bankrupted the USSR. And now, look at all the (civil) wars in former Eastern Europe and Russian Commonwealth!

Morale of it all: mankind more often finds a reason for war than for peace.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been essentially political from its inception. It was in fact the original Nobel prize created by an endownment from Alfred Nobel (the inventor of dynamite and a Swede). His reasons for creating the prize are of course know only to him, but the generally accepted theory is that he wanted to ease the guilt he felt from making a fortune from such a destructive and harmful invention.

He also deliberately made the choice to have the prize granted in Norway, and not his native Sweden as a political statement. Norway at the time was a Vassal state of the Swedish crown, a situation Nobel considered wrong. All of the other Nobel prizes came later as the size of the endowment grew beyond what was necessary to support the original prize. All of the subsequent prizes are awarded in Sweden.

Originally Posted by Kees

Fact or wishful thinking? There used to be a time (The Cold War) when having nuclear bombs as a mutual deterrent was thought to prevent wars! Eventually it bankrupted the USSR. And now, look at all the (civil) wars in former Eastern Europe and Russian Commonwealth!

Morale of it all: mankind more often finds a reason for war than for peace.

Peace is an ideal we hypothesis because there have been times in our history that we have not been at war.

well, i don't know what you mean by this, kees - are you suggesting that trying to avoid the conesquences of global warming is a bad thing? or that there is no point of awarding peace prizes at all because humans will always find a reason to kill each other, and the whatever current one they use is just as good as the next?
Or are you saying that the global warning isn't a proven fact? I would agree with this, but I would argue that there is a strong enough evidence to warrant taking action because waiting until proven beyond any possible doubt is inacceptably late.

i know i'm going again off topic but i disagree that the USSR was bankrupted by the nuclear arms race. After each side had enough stockpile to annihilate the planet few times there was no point of building more. i think it failed because it was an inferior economic system. somehow though it seems that a large part of any conflict is economic - from the dawn of mankind when they didn't even have to disguise it, to modern times - one group of people feel that they should be getting more and that have enough power to obtain it.

Gore getting a shared peace price is ludicrous imo, and more a consequence of strong lobbying. He has made no personal sacrifices and he didn't actually do anything conflict related as far as I am aware. A lot of people are more deserving of that award.
If gore deserves it then Bill Gates doubly so. He spends millions per year per country on innoculation campaigns in order to make the people in Africa healthier.

About Gorbachev: I admire the man. Looking at it with hindsight it is easy to say that the USSR would collapse for the sole reason that their economy was less efficient than the US economy. But in order to let it happen peacefully, he had to do a lot of orchestrating. And he did it with risk of his own life.
It could just as easily have turned into the same affair as yugoslavia or bosnia herzegovina, but on a continental scale.
OT: I think it is ironic that the 'new' Russia is led by a man who used to represent everything that was wrong with the USSR. And they love him for it.

As crazy as it sounds, I also think MAD works, and is the only reason that the world is fairly stable when it comes to the superpowers.

Bruno, What is MAD?

I think "mutual assured destruction".

@ Gugi: I think global warming is a fact. I think it is mainly due to the fact there's simply too many people on earth. With China's and other developing countries' economic boom I think it is a fallacy to believe that energy conservation alone is gonna decrease production of greenhouse gases sufficiently. For every 1% we consume less there's a whole new generation of fossil fuel users born in both the 1st and 3rd world. Promotion of birth control IMHO would do more good but as this is too controversial an issue no politician will ever dare promote it for fear of losing voters.

I think making peace should be encouraged but I am OTOH not convinced that mankind's inclination to greed, envy etc. will ever change. Therefore new conflicts are always round the corner. Which does not mean that making peace or solving old conflicts should not be encouraged. Most wars are about who is allowed to live where and use which land to live on. Which brings us back to an overcrowded world as a major cause of war.

Indeed. Mutually Assured Destruction.
All superpowers have a policy and technology in place to assure that in the event of a nuclear attack, nukes get launched to wherever the original attack came from.

this means that the US has ICBMs standing by for if Russia attacks and vice versa. And of China and basically everybody who has ICBM capabilities do the same thing.

In a sense this has made the world a safer place because none of the large superpowers dare attack each other. It also means that if someone would be mad enough to launch a first strike, most strategically important cities will be melted to glass around the globe.

These days the majority of the ICBM installations is said to be non-hot anymore. i.e. the warheads are not loaded in the missile, and the missile is no longer on a hair trigger, but a couple of hours max is all it takes to unleash hell.

Sometime ago someone told me that his wife doesn't have a job atm because her qualifications are wrong. When I asked what she did, he said 'Her last job was designing light switches for the instant sun device.' It took me a couple of seconds to figure out.
Turns out she designed the detonators for the last generation of soviet era thermonuclear weapons.
Imagine telling that at an employment office.